Site News

Perhaps you've been wondering lately what's been keeping me so busy that I do not properly and punctually update this website. It has been a secret, but now you can know: Brine Weekly, a new online multimedia humor magazine, has gone online with its first issue.

Go have a look. I think it's a pretty promising start out the gate. Special thanks to Cathy and Max for getting this project started and getting the rest of us involved. We do accept submissions, if you were wondering (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

I know only about three people read this blog regularly, so I would like to ask them: Would you like it if I did some kind of weekly movie round-up, every Sunday night or something, where I post short reviews of the movies I saw that week? Would this be useful or interesting to you?

I go to see a lot of movies. It might be an interesting way to actually provide regularly scheduled content on this blog.

Please answer in the comments--if you're a regular reader, I'm not interested in boring or alienating you by talking a lot about something you don't care about.

Tonight, after upgrading all my sites to the latest versions of their respective software, I needed to make a choice about what to do with Dalton. After mucking around on comics websites with both (heavily edited) Movable Type and WordPress's ComicPress theme, I determined that ComicPress is better for managing Dalton. Transitioning everything from MT was kind of a headache, but it's at least I did it before the site got big.

Besides losing all the comments on the old MT-based Dalton site, the RSS feed has also changed. If you were following the comic, please update your RSS reader accordingly.

The comic is not dead. It will continue.

I've been changing some things about the site over the last couple days. None of them will be particularly noticeable to you, gentle reader, as they all take place behind the scenes. They may, however, temporarily break some things.

If this happens, please do not be alarmed. Instead, contact me via one of the many fine means detailed on the About page and let me know what's broken and, if possible, what error message you're getting.

You might have noticed that I just added a favicon to the site. It is a tiny wolf head. You have no idea how hard it is to make a 16x16 pixel image look even vaguely like a tiny wolf head until you have attempted this Herculean feat.

It's always been a pain for me to create and edit ICO files because popular image editing programs like Photoshop don't recognize them by default. There are a few ICO converters out there, but it makes the whole matter a two-step process. However, a little googling revealed this ICO file format plugin for Photoshop, which adds that missing functionality to Photoshop itself. It is supernaturally useful.

I've been so busy with other things lately that I haven't been updating my delightful and utterly exciting blog. I've finally kicked off on the Dalton comic, but I suspect there are still bugs to work out with regards to the site. Some of them will only magically appear when I post more than one comic. Exciting!

It will probably eventually get its own domain, but I'm waiting to see if I'm committed enough to it. Drawing a comic is hard, and drawing a comic regularly is even harder. Because I'm a horrible freak, I draw better on paper than digitally, so the comic is drawn and inked entirely by hand, with brushes and dip pens. Basically I guess this is an experiment in using the most archaic methods possible. Next thing you know, I'll be delivering the comic to your house via express telegram. (Due to the restrictions of the delivery medium, rather than receiving a comic, you will receive a truncated script with stirring descriptions of the images you would have seen had you been viewing the comic.)

I think the comic is looking all right, though. And perhaps it's a reasonable enough explanation for my absence. I'm not sure how frequently I'll update--I might try for bi-weekly, but I'm not making any commitments until I'm really sure what I'm doing. So there.

The long weekend is upon us, and that means it is time for me to give you an update on what is going on in the wacky world of MY WEBSITE.

In case you were wondering:

• I have not been able to find a copy of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus at any of my local video stores, despite the fact that it was supposed to come out last Tuesday. This is kind of surprising, because the video store down the street from me already has such masterpieces as Boa vs. Python and, in fact, probably every other crappy creature film ever made. I thought they'd have Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus on the first day. How disappointing!


• Before you suggest it: No, I will not buy Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. This is not a movie I need to own.


• One of my older drawings, "My Preciousss," is now featured as part of the online fantasy choose-your-own-adventure game Age of Fable. Check it out!


• I'm going to draw some Scott Pilgrim fan art, so you can expect that to start showing up here over the next few weeks.


• There will be more drunk postcards, but I may not post them here. Because I want you all to buy the final zine.


• That secret comic I've been working on? It's coming. I'm putting together a webspace for it and working on the first couple pages. It will happen soon. I can feel it.

Well, because I have no self-control when it comes to joining social networks, I now have a page on ComicSpace, which I guess is like MySpace but for comics creators and fans. MySpace sucks, but this site seems to be pretty okay.

Speaking of social networking, I have also taken the liberty of doing some old-fashioned social networking (that means HTML linking) to some of my friends' websites in the right-hand column of the main blog page. These guys are pretty cool. You should probably look at their websites and subscribe to their RSS feeds and listen to their music and view their drawings and read their webcomics.

Also, you guys should comment now and then. Really. Having commenting set up but no one commenting is dumb. You can either sign up for a commenting account here, or you can use your OpenID/LiveJournal login if you already have those.

Okay, well, that's all I got for the time being. There are still secret comics in the works. One of them has a couple strips up, but I don't want to link to it until we have more than that. The other is still in the works, very close to getting started (and will probably be more on schedule than the other one).

Due to some recent Changes of Circumstance, I am now accepting commissions. I charge based on how long a given project is expected to take, and rates vary depending on what you intend to use the image for. Fun stuff featuring your personal character or avatar is very cheap. Please contact me for more information.

In other news, I spent the afternoon screwing around with this site instead of doing anything else I intended to do today:

• Added a page for comics in the gallery. With my recent posts of old material and new, I thought there were enough comics to validate it. I want to get into a comics habit anyway, so look for that to get some good use in the future.
• I finally stooped and added a PayPal "Donate" button to the sidebar. Running a website (even a smallish one) costs money, and ad revenue isn't much. If you like lookin' at this site and want to donate a few bucks toward the cost of running it, I would very much appreciate it.

It looks like there were a few things I rather missed while setting up this site. Apparently commenting of any sort was not working for several reasons--people could not sign up for accounts, comments through LiveJournal were being marked as spam and methodically deleted by the system, and it was just a mess all around.

I have fixed it so that you should be able to sign up for commenter accounts directly on the site now. LJ users should also be able to comment using their LiveJournal sign-in for authentication. Comments will post automatically without any interference from me. If you experience any problems with the system, please get a hold of me and let me know.